George Tiller’s May 31 homicide would
have attracted attention beyond Wichita, Kansas, under any circumstances. He
was murdered while serving as an usher in the lobby of a crowded Lutheran
church just as Sunday morning service was beginning.

But this was not a simple act of mayhem
in a sacred place. It was a political assassination.

“George R. Tiller, the nation’s most
prominent provider of controversial late-term abortions, was shot and killed
yesterday,” the Washington Post’s Robert Barnes reported on page one
on June 1. “Tiller, 67, had performed abortions since the 1970s. He ran the
Women’s Health Care Services clinic, one of three in the nation to perform
abortions after the point where a fetus is considered able to survive
outside the womb.”

Other news organizations gave the
killing similar prominence, and for good reason. Tiller’s clinic had been
frequently besieged by protestors, was bombed in 1985, and was often
vandalized. In 1993, Tiller himself was shot in both arms by an abortion
protester.

Within three hours, police had arrested
51 year-old Scott Roeder of suburban Kansas City, driving a minivan on I-35
that witnesses of the shooting had described to police. Soon he was charged
with first-degree murder.

Since there was little question about
the identity of the alleged shooter, coverage and discussion quickly turned
to the question of the significance of the shooting. What followed was a
donnybrook.

For the next few weeks, newspapers, web
sites, radio, and TV were filled with impassioned debate about the Tiller
shooting and the permissible limits of legal dissent. Writing in late July,
David Usborne, the U.S. editor of the London Independent, observed
that the Tiller case, in which “one of the last doctors in the country to
continue to practice late terminations in defiance of anti-abortionists” was
assassinated, “reveals how polarized and how fiercely, sometimes homicidally
emotional the struggle has become.”

Writing in Time on June 15,
Nancy Gibbs captured that polarization: When Tiller was shot, “both sides of
the abortion debate braced for battle. Supporters called him a martyr;
critics called him a murderer. Both groups deplored his killing: abortion
rights activists warned that it could signal a fresh wave of clinic
violence; abortion opponents warned that it would lead to the demonizing of
their movement.”

In the immediate wake of the murder,
however, the first question was: Who is Scott Roeder? In the scramble for an
answer, it became clear that the Kansas City Star still had the boots
on the ground to cover police news vigorously. Over the summer, Star
reporter Judy L. Thomas and her colleagues consistently led the pack in
uncovering information about the alleged assassin.

On June 2, the Star reported
that Roeder “was a member of an anti-government group in the 1990s and a
staunch opponent of abortion.” He had, the paper reported, become deeply
involved in the radical anti-government, anti-tax “Freeman” movement in
Kansas. In 1996, he was arrested after posting comments on a variety of
anti-abortion websites when police discovered the ingredients for pipe bombs
in his car.

“Those who know Roeder said he believed
that killing abortion doctors was an act of justifiable homicide,” Thomas
wrote, quoting Kansas City anti-abortion activist Regina Dinwiddie as
saying. “I know he very strongly believed that abortion was murder and that
you ought to defend the little ones, both born and unborn.”

Dinwiddie said she had met Roeder while
picketing outside a Planned Parenthood Clinic in 1995. He had asked to see
Dr. Robert Crist, the director of the clinic. “Robert Crist came out and
[Roeder] stared at him for approximately 45 seconds,” she recalled.
“[Roeder] said, ‘I’ve seen you now,” and walked away, and they were scared
to death.”

In the wake of this story, interviews
with Roeder’s ex-wife and other family members began telling the media that
Roeder had serious mental health problems. “The man I married disappeared
into this other person years ago,” Lindsey Roeder told the New York Times
on June 2. “He wanted a scapegoat for his own serious financial problems.
First it was taxes, he stopped paying, then he turned to the church and got
involved in anti-abortion.”

Thomas and other Star reporters
excavated Roeder’s religious background in a series of stories in late July
and August. During a prison interview, he told Thomas that he had converted
to a “messianic” form of Christianity in 1992. She reported that he was
involved for a while with a Messianic (Jews for Jesus) Jewish congregation
in suburban Overland Park, Kansas.

Rabbi Shmuel Wolkenfeld of Or HaOlam
congregation told the Star that Roeder had participated in study
groups at the congregation, but that he hadn’t seen him for several years.
“With Scott, we had a bunch of discussions, then he just disappeared,”
Wolkenfeld said. “I wish we could have helped him, but he had his own
opinions.”

Wolkenfeld said Roeder was unhappy that
the congregation was registered as a tax-exempt religious body and was eager
to delve into conspiracy theories about Freemasonry and his contention that
Prince Charles was the Antichrist.

As the picture emerged of Roeder as
mentally unbalanced, isolated, devoted to fringe political and religious
movements, and confrontational, the disputation about responsibility for the
murder began in earnest. Taking place mostly on editorial pages and among
the talking heads, it was extraordinarily vigorous, mostly because views
about Tiller and his work diverged so sharply.

“Bombings. Butyric acid attacks. Sniper
shootings. Letters filled with fake anthrax. These are some of the tactics
used over the years by antiabortion extremists,” Richard Fausset of the
Los Angeles Times wrote on June 1. Tiller’s killing, he noted, was the
fourth of a doctor and the eighth of an abortion clinic worker since the
early 1970s. Altogether, the National Abortion Federation had tallied 6,100
“acts of violence” against abortion providers.

Abortion opponents, especially the
“mainstream” pro-life groups, moved rapidly to condemn the killing. “Our
bishops’ conference and all its members have repeated and publicly denounced
all forms of violence, including abortion as well as misguided resort to
violence by anyone opposed to abortion,” Cardinal Justin Rigali of
Philadelphia said, speaking on behalf of the U.S. Conference of Catholic
Bishops.

“We are stunned at today’s news,” said
Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council. “As Christians we
pray and look toward the end of all violence and for the saving of souls,
not the taking of human life. George Tiller was a man who we publicly sought
to stop through legal and peaceful ways.”

Not everyone, however, was so
controlled. Randall Terry, the famous anti-abortion hardliner who was exiled
from Operation Rescue for his extremism, minced no words. “George Tiller was
a mass murderer,” he said in a statement that wound up just about
everywhere. “We grieve for him that he did not have time to properly prepare
his soul to face God. I am more concerned that the Obama Administration will
use Tiller’s killing to intimidate pro-lifers into surrendering our most
effective rhetoric and actions.”

It was this insistence that abortion is
murder and that aggressive confrontation with doctors in their clinics,
homes, and churches is a “most effective” action that proved to be the key
ground of contention in following weeks.

Journalists heard a lot from
individuals who shared Terry’s point of view. The Philadelphia Inquirer
opened an editorial on June 2 by reporting a “chilling” email from an
Olathe, Kansas women who apparently “e-blasted” many journalists: “Cry for
this man? Are you kidding? If you believe in evil, this man’s middle name
was George ‘Satan’ Tiller. That he was shot and killed in church tells me
that God was OK with his demise.”

“The overwhelming bulk of anti-abortion
activity, of course, has nothing to do with violence or intimidation,”
Portland Oregonian columnist David Sarasohn wrote on June 3. “But
when political trends run against them, parts of the fringe tend to turn to
bloody reprisal.”

“Lone gunman?” ran the headline over an
Ellen Goodman column in the June 5 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “Dr.
Tiller’s assassin was the soloist in chorus of vitriol.” Like many writers
that week, Goodman had Fox TV’s Bill O’Reilly in her sights: “Consider the
verbal targeting of `Tiller the Baby Killer’ What do you say, for example,
about Bill O’Reilly, who attacked Dr. Tiller repeatedly as someone who would
`kill a baby a half-hour before the baby is supposed to be born for no
reason whatsoever other than the mother has a pain in her foot’?”

“O’Reilly is being incredibly
disingenuous when he claims that he bears no responsibility for other’s
action in the killing of Dr. George Tiller on Sunday,” Mary Alice Carr, vice
president of communications for the National Abortion Rights Action League,
wrote in a Washington Post op-ed piece on June 4. “When you tell an
audience of millions over and over again that someone is an executioner, you
cannot feign surprise when someone executes that person. You cannot claim to
hold no responsibility for what other people do when you call for people to
besiege Tiller’s clinic, as O’Reilly did in January 2008.”

Eyal Press joined the attack in the
June 7 edition of the Nation: “Before he was murdered, Dr. George
Tiller was a popular topic on Fox’s ‘O’Reilly Factor,’ with the host
referring to him as ‘Tiller the Baby Killer,’ a man guilty of ‘Nazi stuff.’
These are not innocent words as doctors targeted by anti-abortion protesters
have pointed out in the past.

“In a letter to his hometown newspaper
some years ago, one such physician wrote: ‘The members of the local
non-violent, pro-life community may continue to picket my home. They may
continue to scream that I am a murderer and a killer when I enter the
clinics at which they ‘peacefully’ exercise their First Amendment Right of
freedom of speech. They may do all of the above to me and other abortion
providers of this community. But please don’t feign surprise, dismay and
certainly not innocence when a more volatile and less restrained member of
the groups decides to react to their inflammatory rhetoric by shooting an
abortion provider.”

The words, Press wrote, appeared in the
Buffalo News in 1994 and were written by Dr. Barnett Slepian, who was
killed by an anti-abortion sniper in his home in October 1998.

O’Reilly took these attacks stoically,
writing them off as personal and political animus. On the June 15 edition of
“The O’Reilly Factor,” he sparred vigorously with Joan Walsh of Salon.com,
asking her repeatedly whether late-term fetuses had any legal rights and
asserting repeatedly that Tiller routinely performed abortions on viable
fetuses for “casual” reasons.

When Walsh criticized O’Reilly for
crusading intensely against Tiller, he demurred.

WALSH:
And look, Bill, you crusaded against him.

O'REILLY:
You bet.

WALSH:
You crusaded against him. He had been shot twice already.

O'REILLY:
And I'm sorry about that.

WALSH:
His clinic had been exploded.

O'REILLY:
I'm sorry about that.

WALSH:
His clinic had been attacked, bombed, vandalized.

O'REILLY:
But my constitutional right says I can say what I say. You say what you say,
as vile as you say it, you can say it. And I would never condemn you for
saying it. You are misguided. You have blood on your hands because you
portray this man as a hero when he killed late-term babies for casual
reasons.

By mid
June, pro-life commentators were trying hard to knock down the charge that
their tactics made them culpable for the crimes of extremists.

“I didn’t
kill George Tiller,” Christine M. Flowers, a Philadelphia lawyer and writer,
complained in an op-ed in the Philadephia Daily News on June 12.
“Neither did Bill O’Reilly, Randall Terry, Pope Benedict or the little old
lady praying the rosary outside Planned Parenthood. So to all the pro-choice
advocates and their sympathizers in the media, drop the collective guilt
trip.

“Just
because I abhorred Tiller’s chosen medical specially, which resulted in the
termination of close to 60,000 pregnancies over his three-decade career,
doesn’t mean I sought his demise in any way. Of course, you’d never know
that from the way the press and assorted interest groups have reacted.”

On June
13, syndicated columnist Terry Mattingly complained in the Knoxville
News-Sentinel that the media was underplaying the historic efforts of
pro-life leaders to criticize or rein in the violent. He cited interventions
in 1994 by Cardinal John O’Connor of New York and Richard Land of the
Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.

At
Mattingly’s GetReligon.org media watch dog web site, a series of pieces
appeared in June to express concern that stories were unfairly tarring
pro-life groups. “I’m raising my eyebrows right now at mainstream coverage
that seems to make alleged gunman Scott Roeder part of a movement that
includes the U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference, the Southern Baptist
Convention and the National Right to Life Committee,” Mattingly posted on
June 2.

GetReligion’s Mollie Ziegler followed with posts on June 8 and 9 complaining
about reporters’ failure to follow up on Tiller’s religious past—most
notably, his “excommunication” from a Missouri Synod Lutheran congregation
before he moved to Resurrection Lutheran Church, an Evangelical Lutheran
Church in America congregation. And why, she asked, did they pass over the
judgment of Johns Hopkins University psychiatrist Paul McHugh that Tiller
performed thousands of late-term abortions in cases where the fetus was
healthy or suffered from conditions like Down Syndrome?

Although
Mattingly, et. al. scored some points about journalistic pro-choice
fellow-traveling, like most others rising to defend the pro-life
establishment, they declined to engage the most potent charge against the
pro-lifers: that because of their rhetoric of abortion as murder and tactics
of aggressive confrontation, they bore some responsibility for Tiller’s
death.

The day
after the shooting, Slate columnist William Saletan put the charge
this way: “If you don’t accept what he did, then maybe it’s time to
ask yourself what you really believe. Is abortion murder? Or is it something
less, a tragedy that would be better avoided? Most of us think it’s
the latter.
We’re looking for ways to prevent abortions—not just a few this month, but
millions down the line—without
killing or prosecuting people.”

In a web
discussion on Reason magazine’s site on June 12, libertarian
columnist Jacob Sullum suggested that the pro-life contention that abortion
is murder but shouldn’t be opposed by force wasn’t coherent. “If you
honestly believe that abortion is the murder of helpless children, it’s hard
to see why using deadly force against those who carry it out is immoral.”

The closest anyone in the pro-life camp
came to acknowledging responsibility for Tiller’s death was a June 6
statement from Catholic Bishop Robert Lynch of St. Petersburg Florida—though
it extended the blame to the other side, as well:

“Tiller’s
death is indefensible under any rule of law, civil or moral. To many people,
myself included, abortion is indefensible under the moral law but is legally
permissible. Calls from within both camps for aggressive advocacy for or
against the law runs the risk of encouraging people such as the perpetrator
in Tiller’s death to take the issue into their own hands.”

Just how the anti-abortion movement ran
the risk of encouraging Roeder became clear in David Barstow’s 5,793-word
story on the Tiller saga that appeared in the New York Times on July
26. In it, Barstow painted a complex picture of the lengthy, bitter struggle
between Tiller and his opponents.

“For more than 30 years, the
anti-abortion movement threw everything they had into driving Dr. Tiller out
of business, certain that his defeat would be a devastating blow to the
‘abortion industry’ that has terminated roughly 50 million pregnancies since
Roe v. Wade in 1973.

“They blockaded his clinic; campaigned
to have him prosecuted, boycotted his suppliers, tailed him with hidden
cameras; branded him `Tiller the Baby Killer;’ hit him with lawsuits,
legislation and regulatory complaints; and protested relentlessly, even at
his church. Some sent flowers pleading for him to quit. One bombed his
clinic. Another tried to kill him in 1993, firing five shots, wounding both
arms,” Barstow wrote.

Barstow laid out the relentlessness of
the campaign to thwart Tiller:

“Dozens of anti-abortion groups of
varying sizes and philosophies were out to shut down his clinic, Women’s
Health Care Services. While their tactics constantly changed, they shared
the same basic goal. ‘We wanted it to get to the point where it was no
longer feasible to stay open,” Mark S. Gietzen of the Kansas Coalition for
Life said.

“Every vendor who showed up at the
clinic was warned that if they continued to do business with Dr. Tiller,
they would be boycotted. Those who ignored the threat were listed on
anti-abortion web sites. ‘We have nobody in town who would deliver pizza,’
said an employee, Linda Joslin. “Protestors confronted his employees,
demanding that they quit. If they refused, activists passed out fliers in
their neighborhood of working for a baby killer. Patients would encounter a
gauntlet of protestors.”

Barstow’s account did not fail to
address the concerns of the protesters, especially their contention that
many or most of the late term abortions performed at the clinic did not
involve catastrophic deformities. Of the 4,800 late-term abortions performed
at the clinic since 1998, he wrote, probably 2,800 did not involve fetuses
that could not have survived outside the womb. Some involved fetuses with
Down’s syndrome but “many were perfectly healthy.”

No one argued that Cardinal Rigali or
Richard Land or even Randall Terry ordered a hit on Tiller, but it’s clear
that the unceasing confrontational campaign in Wichita did involve a large
number of “mainstream” pro-life groups over a lengthy period. Reporting by
Barstow, Judy Thomas, and others showed that Scott Roeder—although by no
means a major figure in pro-life activities in Kansas and Missouri—
participated over a long period in anti-abortion activities and was quite
well known. He picketed, he did “street counseling,” he campaigned on the
Internet, and he attended the Kansas trial that ended in March when Tiller
was acquitted of 19 misdemeanor charges that he broke Kansas law in
performing late-term abortions.

Barstow’s
story wasn’t popular over at GetReligion. Calling it “deeply researched but
unbalanced,” Douglas LeBlanc posted a re-edited version that struck out most
of the “positive” adjectives about Tiller. “Barstow’s report implies
that anti-Tiller violence was simply one of many tactics used by a broadly
defined anti-abortion movement,” LeBlanc wrote. “Barstow’s many details are
sometimes obscured by unclear writing, or language that appears to depict
Tiller in heroic terms while describing his
opponents more critically.”

Actually, Barstow’s reporting provided
evidence that there was a high degree of collaboration, over the course of
decades, within a broad range of anti-abortion groups opposed to Tiller and
fiercely dedicated to shutting him down. Many of them were extremely
confrontational and sought actively to shame and humiliate women going to
the clinic, clinic staff, and vendors. Many of them, not including Roeder,
who did post suggestions on the web on this topic, persistently disrupted
Sunday services at Resurrection Lutheran Church to demand Tiller’s expulsion
and used the church’s membership list to mail postcards with photos of
aborted fetuses to the homes of parishioners.

“Roeder was not one of us,”
Philadelphia Daily News columnist Christine Flowers insisted on June 12.
“He was a psychopath, a man whose demented mind led him to commit a crime
that is, essentially, the antithesis of what the pro-life movement
represents.”

It is hard, at this point, to take such
self-exoneration seriously. Roeder was one of them, and not the first to
take the movement’s violent words and confrontational deeds one step
further.